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Hot Docs: Film premiere brings online threats

Security is being added for Parvez Sharma, 41, the gay Muslim director of A Sinner in Mecca, following online threats ahead of his film’s world premiere at Hot Docs Wednesday.

“It’s (being done) out of an abundance of caution,” said Hot Docs executive director Brett Hendrie. “It’s obviously a film that is provocative and high interest, and so we have somebody who will be with Parvez.”

“I am a little worried. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” said the filmmaker as he left his New York home for Toronto, adding Hot Docs was arranging “a security detail of some sort” in response to his concerns about online hate mail and death threats.

“I expected backlash, but I did not expect it so early,” said Sharma, who said he was denounced and had a fatwa imposed on him by “a minor religious figure in South Africa” following the release of his 2007 film A Jihad for Love, which looked at the lives of gay, lesbian and transgender Muslims.

Hendrie said it is “quite rare” to add security at the festival, but it has happened in the past.

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The threats, which don’t mention Toronto or Hot Docs, have come in via the film’s website and on message boards, which “have completely lit up where people are denouncing the film and me,” said Sharma. Iranian state media have denounced A Sinner in Mecca as part of a “Western conspiracy” to legitimize the “despicable sin of homosexuality.”

“No one has even seen (the film) yet and yet the reaction has been enormous,” said Sharma.

In A Sinner in Mecca, Sharma chronicles his hajj, a religious pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, an act of devotion that assures forgiveness for sins. It’s a deeply personal film about faith, forgiveness and Sharma’s spiritual reconciliation with his late mother, who didn’t accept his homosexuality.

“I need to prove that I can be a good Muslim and be gay,” Sharma says onscreen as he begins his journey, which includes stops in his birthplace of Saharanpur in northern India.

It was a risky endeavour. Homosexuals can face death in Saudi Arabia. And Sharma brought two small cameras and an iPhone into holy sites, where it is forbidden to film. He said some of his footage was erased when his camera was confiscated by the mutaween, Islamic religious police.

Filmmaker Parvez Sharma asked Hot Docs to add security for the world premiere of his film A Sinner in Mecca.

“I was taking a risk with the entire piece,” said Sharma, who was surprised to be even issued a hajj visa, given his notoriety. “I was definitely one of the most public homosexual Muslims in the world. Everything about me is just a Google search away.”

He is also sharply critical in the doc of what he calls the “rigid Saudi version of Islam,” Wahhabism.

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But, Sharma added, he never considered not filming his hajj.

“It is a natural instinct as a filmmaker to document the most important journey I would ever take in my life,” he said, adding his pilgrimage was performed to ask “forgiveness for every wrong I have ever done . . . you ask forgiveness for many different things you have done and you try to change yourself.”

But there was more to it than his expression of faith as a devout Muslim.

“I also feel and this is a strange but very powerful feeling, which happened to be at the Kaaba (the most sacred site in Islam),” he said. “I felt I was making a hajj on behalf of so many gay Muslims who are afraid to go, hundreds of thousands of them. My presence there was a validation for the worldwide community.”

It’s also an open question in the film as to who is the real sinner in Mecca when one of Sharma’s fellow pilgrims makes a shocking confession concerning his reason for seeking forgiveness.

Sharma is expecting tough questions during an onstage Q&A after the film screens. But at no point did he consider skipping Hot Docs.

“Absolutely not,” said Sharma. “I want to stand behind my work and I am proud of it.”

Only rush seats are available for the world premiere of A Sinner in Mecca on April 29. It screens again April 30 and May 2. Go to hotdocs.ca for information.

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